Celebrating 20 years of giving a voice to dancers: Eiko & Koma on the Pleasures of Eating Dirt for Public Service

By Alissa CardoneCopyright 2003, 2018 Alissa Cardone

NEW YORK — During Obon, a very important annual ritual for the dead practiced in Japan, lighted lanterns are hung outside houses to guide the spirits of ancestors back home to visit the living. It is a ritual of many shadows, family reunion and much joy, filled with flickering candles, smoke trails, dancing and sixth sense, and like Eiko & Koma’s latest environmental installation performance “Offering,” it is a ritual for the living.

A dance conceived to urge regeneration after loss and, according to its authors, “to serve a communal need for a ritual of mourning,” I saw “Offering” Friday, during its free four-day run in the cemetery of St. Mark’s Church, where it was presented by Danspace Project. Staged last summer in six NYC parks, this time it was staged in the middle of St. Mark’s yard, atop gravestones (some containing the remains of celebrated NYC founding fathers), a few mounds of fresh soil and an awkward dirt-stuffed oversized altar sculpture that spun. Between two wise billowing trees, after a misty rain, dressed in fire colored sheaths, with Eiko dragging an arrow, the duo moved like fevered sleepwalkers in and out of the earth, towards and away from each other in magnetic indecision — do we sink or do we rise?

(To receive the complete article, subscribers please contact publisher Paul Ben-Itzak at paulbenitzak@gmail.com. Not a subscriber? Subscribe to the DI for one year for just $36 by designating your PayPal payment in that amount to paulbenitzak@gmail.com, or write us at that address to learn how to pay by check. First published exclusively on the DI on February 12, 2003.)

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

Published by danceblogger

Contact Paul Ben-Itzak at artsvoyager@gmail.com. Paul Ben-Itzak was educated at San Francisco's Mission High School, the San Francisco Center for Theater Training, and Princeton University, where he studied with Robert Fagles, Joyce Carol Oates, Ellen Chances, and Lucinda Franks. Also at Princeton, he was founding managing editor of the Nassau Weekly and began contributing to the New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, Atlantic City Press, and many others, later writing for the Arts & Liesure section of the Times. As a San Francisco-based correspondent for Reuters, he was one of the first reporters to cover the AIDS crisis, also covering the arts, the tech sector, and the financial markets. In 1998, he co-founded the leading international arts journal The Dance Insider & Arts Voyager (http://www.danceinsider.com ) and, later, Art Investment News (http://www.artinvestmentnews.com). Paul has also worked as a DJ, children's theater teacher and playwright, and made his debut as an actor on the New York stage in 2011, playing Weston in Sam Shepard's "Curse of the Starving Class."
To date, Paul has translated the sketches of Boris Vian, reviews of theater performances , French tourism sites, and research proposals and articles from CNRS and other researchers. His editing work includes dissertation level papers.
View all posts by danceblogger